Anansi Boys (American Gods) Quotes

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

Each person whoever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.

They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You’d miss how he smiled, how his eyes glowed. And then, after the kiss was done, how he stood, like a man who had just discovered the art of standing and had figured out how to do it better than anyone else who would ever come along.

There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These things are wine, women and song.

The important thing about songs is that they’re just like stories. They don’t mean a damn unless there’s people listenin’ to them.

That’s the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forget more than you ever know.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.

Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.

Of course, everyone’s parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street.